5 Skills Leaders Need To Develop

Anyone can be placed in a leadership role. In most organizations, the reward for being an outstanding individual contributor is to be promoted into leading a team of other individual contributors. But those leaders often find that the skills that made them great employees aren’t as helpful when leading great employees (or even mediocre ones). As Marshall Goldsmith famously says, “what got you here, won’t get you there.”

Being successful as a leader requires developing a certain set of new skills. These skills that may or may not have been a part of any “leadership training” program you’ve attended. In this article, we’ll review five skills leaders need to develop in order to be successful-and five skills aspiring leaders should make a point to develop before stepping into their first leadership role.

Relationship Building

The first skill leaders need to develop is relationship building. Leaders are in the people business and need to develop relationships with each individual member of their team and facilitate relationship building across the members of their team. Positive connections between teammates can be the difference between a high-performing team and a merely average one.

They also need to build good working relationships with other teams in the organization, with clients, vendors, and a…